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Immersive Environments – MIRAGE

About #MetMirage

“It’s Bigger On The Inside!”

MIRAGE is an incredible 360º immersive audiovisual experience. The projected content takes you on a journey of colourful 3D illusions and expansive transformations. The mirrored floor and ceiling create an all-encompassing infinity effect that greatly amplifies the visual experience.

For this project, Go2 Productions worked very closely with BOLD Event Creative, who originally came up with the concept and also engineered and built the structure. The collaboration between the two teams was extremely positive from start to finish, with both teams passionate and dedicated to making this a truly unique experience. Go2 was responsible for developing the technology solution and designing and producing the projected content and soundscape. A perfect partnership.

The Challenge

There were a couple of notable challenges to overcome with this project, both on the creative side and technical side.

The creative challenge was to design an experience that appealed to all ages ranging from the very young to the very old. To overcome this we designed the experience around colour, geometry and depth perception. The experience starts out simple, showing a grid of white dots on a black background on just one wall, that calmly shrink and grow with the audio track. The dots then compress into flat lines and expand outwards to fill the entire room with stripes. As the stripes meet opposite, the walls appear to push outwards, giving the illusion the room expanding outwards. With this new perceived space, we began playing with distance, geometric transformations, rotations, lighting and texture effects giving the sensation of being in a much larger room. The final effect is incredible.

The biggest technical challenge was the placement of the ultra short throw projectors. In normal use, they sit perpendicular to a projection surface and throw an image up perfectly square that is three feet above (or below) the projector. We needed these projectors to be as close to the ceiling as possible and throw an image horizontally to cover the wall from floor to ceiling – This configuration was definitely not in the projectors’ manual. To achieve this we found the perfect angle to tip the projectors was 8º. This meant our projector positioning needed to be extremely precise. This created a very acute trapezoid projection on the wall that became very tight on total surface coverage, but it did cover the entire wall as we planned. Once we had coverage we warped the video image to fit each wall perfectly.

Lot's of positive social media activity using #MetMirage

The Results

MIRAGE is an art installation that is open for 7 weeks. Within the first few days of opening we already had over 1000 people per day going through the experience. By the end of the first week, the numbers were up to 1200 people per day, with hundreds of tweets and posts being uploaded to social media on daily basis. This was all made possible via the web cam and iPad we installed as part of the experience. Guests have also been filming their experience inside and posting the footage from their smartphones using apps like Periscope and Facebook LIVE.